Introduction
The book ‘Desert Solitary’ by Edward Abbey made me to think over the burning problem of nowadays, as environment and how far we, modern people, are from the nature.
Main Text
Edward Abbey lives in the Arches National Monument near Moab, Utah, for three seasons and works as a single park ranger, which he prefers. He admires silence and beauty of the nature. We can see that he is a violent, passionate lover of the nature already from the first chapter “The First Morning”. It is seen from the various descriptions and comparisons, from his perfect knowledge of names of animals and plants, such as “…kangaroo mice, a jackrabbit, an animal that looked like a cross between a raccoon and a squirrel-the ringtail cat…” “The First Morning” (Abbey 2). The author confronts nature with people and chooses nature ‘I’d sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.’ “The First Morning” (Abbey 4-5). The entire chapter, as well as the book, is penetrated with the idea of unity of human beings, flora and fauna.
The spirit the book is written in is dual: from one hand, we can feel author’s love and tenderness; and from the other hand, it is danger and criticism. I would like to talk about the first chapter of this book ‘The First Morning’. While reading the chapter I have felt strong author’s negative attitude to that people are everywhere in nature now, we greatly interfere in it “I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate.” (Abbey 4). I liked that Edward Abbey chooses as his “beautiful place that he cares in his heart and soul” (Abbey 1), not commonly adopted place as the house at the seaside or the comfortable apartment with a beautiful view, but the canyonlands in suburb of Utah with its untouched and wild reality: ’Glimpses of weird humps of pale rock on either side, like petrified elephants, dinosaurs, stone age hobgoblins.’ ”The First Morning” (Abbey 2) I am very thankful to the author that he has made this marvelous nature more accessible to me and other readers of the text, it greatly inspires to save the environment for our future, so we and the following generations could enjoy it. The mentioning of the trailer in the middle of this wild beauty highlights the amenities of the surrounding nature very strongly: “What are the Arches? From my place in front of the house trailer I can see several of the hundred or more of them which have been discovered in the park. These are natural arches, holes in the rock, windows in stone, no two alike, as varied in form as in dimension.’ (Abbey 3).
Conclusion
At first sight, we might think that Edward wanted to stay alone, but it is not so – he wanted to stay one on one with nature, he celebrated his first morning in solitary desert and he was the happiest person on the earth at the moment cause he felt unity with environment.
After reading this text I strongly felt the necessity to communicate with the nature, as it is an integral part of any of us!
Work Cited
Edward Abbey. “The First Morning.” Desert Solitary. Ballantine Books, 1985. 1-5.